Versioning

Versioning has been added to the lit review a the different approaches to integrating IBM's clear case with the comparison tool have been investigated. This was very interesting there were 2 options one to use triggers to trigger the application to launch passing in the 2 files and another option of using ClearCase Automation Library (CAL) COM object with Java. Rick Dunn and Dean Godfrey were useful resources to tap into as theny both have previous experiance in this field. I am now up to 2000 rough words. Good progress!

Lit review progress

The lit review is progressing well. There is now a rough draft of the initial section of the review (around 1000 words!) It's nice to get the ball rolling having spent many hours programming. Within the section I try to justify using a stand alone test harness to test the application, so some articles on automated testing have been reviewed as well as myself remembering previous experience from writing test scripts at Honda. I actually quite enjoyed writing this section, previous blog posts look to be very useful for writing the lit review. There are many loose ends which will need smoothing out before the initial hand in at the end of the month.

Apologies

Apologies for the lack of activity on the blog recently I have been home for Easter and only have limited internet access.

Just to get you up to speed the application is pretty much finished, all is left is to get the application to upload the rss file and associated HTML files to a webspace, commenting of the code and testing.

The plan for the time being though is to start writing the lit review there has been some research done before coding but not enough so I have a big task on my hands, this is due in in about ten days as well as the output data from the application. I'd like to aim for 1000 words a day on the lit review, this gives plenty of time to neaten it up.

Coding Progress

The simulator is now complete, I learnt some new useful skills like using the timer class and how to export a DOM object as XML in Java, I can see these skills being very beneficial beneficial in the future. The test harness is fully configurable for robustness.

Coding has started on the main comparison tool.

Computer Death and Progress

On Thursday evening my computer died, so it's taken a while to recover data e.t.c, so this has been a bit of a setback.

However today good progress has been made, I didn't realise the workload the test harness presented but it should most defiantly be completed by end of play tomorrow, there are now methods for deleting elements, attributes and words, methods for elements, attributes and words and methods for deleting elements, attributes and words. Hopefully the comparison tool will not take the same amount of time, the file crawler aspect of the tool has already been written. Regardless time is very tight, I could be looking at 2 weeks for both the lit review and data collection to be completed, luckily there is some work I can salvage from the lit review before the project was changed.

Configuration Of File Manipulator

The config file was designed for the modifying of files and data for the XML simulator application: ( I'm thinking some documentation is going to be needed for all of these configuration files!)

xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>

<config>

<rootDirectory value="C:\Documents and Settings\Leigh\My Documents\Dissertation\Code\XMLSimulation\files\generatedXML">rootDirectory>

<delNoOfElements value="1">delNoOfElements>

<delNoOfAttributes value="1">delNoOfAttributes>

<delNoOfWords value="1">delNoOfWords>

<delNoOfFiles value="1">delNoOfFiles>

<modNoOfElements value="1">modNoOfElements>

<modNoOfAttributes value="1">modNoOfAttributes>

<modNoOfWords value="1>modNoOfWords>

config>

And a class was written to load this into a hash table. The next stage is to finally start manipulating the XML data at certain intervals, luckily the file crawler is already written, so after this stage is completed it will be time to start properly on the file comparison tool, I'll work all through the weekend to make sure as much of this is done as possible. A meeting with Mike may be necessary on Friday as a lot of progress has been made.